Outside Athens
by razor840
Summary: Thank you for showing me who I really am. Maybe you were the only person who really saw how ugly and contemptible I could be." House and Wilson stumble into Cameron's existential crisis. Spoilers for Season 6.
1. Chapter 1

Wilson felt like he had been passing by the same scenery for hours; gas stations, the scrubby grass and vegetation that tended to grow chaotically around heavily used traffic arteries, the occasional fallow field, the occasional shuttered factory. It was the new face of the Rust Belt. He cursed the fifty five mile an hour speed limit, he'd have been there by now if they were following (or not following with impunity) New Jersey traffic laws. He was driving South, from Cleveland, where he had been attending a conference.

He let something happen and then later wallowed in the guilt. It was something he tended to do and it could be called a compulsion. House would definitely call it a compulsion and he would probably be right, like he always was. He was going to see Cameron who had left rather abruptly almost two years ago. House never told him what actually happened, and it was a situation with too many exigencies and too many players who were far too good at deception for him to get the unvarnished truth or really, any truth at all. He knew that Chase did something and he knew that Cameron was unhappy about it. He knew that Cameron was also unhappy that both Foreman and House knew but neglected to tell her. He heard the end of a heated discussion in House's office. He had seen an email from Cameron to House, Wilson had his password, it read: 'Thank you for showing me who I really am.'

It was all rather cryptic. What was even more jarring was the level to which he was in the dark on that particular matter. Office gossip, especially the variety that included House's team, was something that he actively indulged in. He salved the feeling of being a busy body with protestations to himself that he was merely looking out for his friend, who was a brilliant medical mind but stunted in area of office politics and general human interaction. He had said as much in the past but House couldn't be bothered to care. Wilson knew that some of it had to do with the fact that as a world renowned diagnostician, he didn't have to dirty his hands with that kind of thing, but it was mostly because he couldn't do it. He was unable to compromise, unable to really manage, and he had Cuddy and Wilson to shield him from interactions which he found unsavory or intellectually bankrupt. It made Wilson feel weak on occasion, it made him feel used in ways that House couldn't understand, but House was his friend for a reason and Wilson knew who he was. He respected who House was.

Justifying House's behavior could occasionally be a daunting task. He was currently dealing with the constant push and pull House was engaging in with Cuddy, it had become unbearable a year ago and yet they were still stubbornly going at it, without a resolution in sight. Wilson had concocted and dismissed numerous schemes that were more complicated than his usual 'tell one person one thing and the other person something else' or 'give a nice calming pep talk after a particularly intense fight' strategies. He was in a holding pattern, he didn't want to play this one wrong. He played it wrong with another woman who had 'feelings' for House. That woman had just sent House a long, rambling email thanking him for 'showing her who she really was.' He mentally slapped himself for being that cold and calculating with his 'friends' before continuing on with the exercise.

This Cleveland conference was something of an escape. Wilson covertly volunteered to speak at it in the hopes that House would just assume that it was a work related obligation but if anything, House's sobriety had made him even more paranoid when it involved peoples' motives. He couldn't prove it, but he was almost positive that House had someone going through his trash at this point. They couldn't have a conversation without House bringing it up and Wilson wondered whether it was the lie itself or the fact that he couldn't figure it out that really bothered House. He hesitated, was almost actually scared to think that it implied any kind of actual feeling for Cameron. House didn't need that at the moment and he assumed Cameron didn't either. Wilson hoped it was the lie, because that implied that House cared about him in some nebulous, undefined way.

House's paranoia had made the new candidate interviews nearly unbearable and eventually they just scrapped them and made Foreman, Taub, and Chase permanent attending physicians in House's department. Nothing was going to change ever again as far House was concerned. Cuddy just gave up this time, gave him what he wanted. Wilson was pleased and he looked forward to things calming down, normalizing to whatever extent they could in House's universe.

Chase was having problems. A reporter had been harassing House's team, something about the African Dictator they treated around the time Cameron and Chase broke up. House had massive amounts of contempt for this woman and thus, getting even the most basic strands of a story out of him was like pulling teeth. So, like any normal, well adjusted person would do, he emailed Cameron in Ohio and invited her out to dinner to troll for information that way. It was only a four hour drive from Columbus to outside Athens, it was practically down the street! He tried to feign shock when Cameron seemed suspicious on the phone, when they were ironing out the particulars. Sometimes he wondered if existing within House's craziness had made him crazy.

When Chase started showing up for work still drunk from the night before, Wilson knew House was going to say something. House usually ran these types of things past him before moving forward. He never really took his advice, but he always talked to him. In some ways, Wilson was not unlike House's window on the world, or at least the part of the world that normal people inhabited. He knew that Wilson cared about other people, their motives, their dreams, that he knew how to listen and how to tell people what they wanted to hear. Wilson was already rehearsing what he was going to say, weighing his options, trying to decide what the best advice would be. When he returned later in the day to find House, Chase, and Foreman all huddled together in House's office, having some kind of intense conversation, he quietly slipped away before they detected his presence.

He caught House up on the roof. He was smoking a cigarette. House played the statistics game every time Wilson brought up the fact that as an oncologist, it was hard for him to watch his best friend smoking. Wilson couldn't win, and no revised statistics from Duke University helped. He found himself constantly seconds away from grabbing the butt out of House's mouth and flicking it off the roof. He hated their rooftop conversations, it made him feel off balance and constantly on the defensive. He couldn't help but nag and House seemed to revel in those back and forth sniping sessions.

"You know. This is a smoke free campus. This roof is technically considered part of the campus," House looked annoyed.

"The Dean of Medicine has a thing for me. Now that the Government is actively against smoking and smokers, it has once again become the cool, rebellious thing to do."

"You'd need to flip your collar up too. Maybe get a barbed wire tattoo around your bicep. Go for broke, start wearing an eye patch."

"An eye patch with the cane might be overkill. Although Cameron might fly back here and fuck me again, right on my desk, if you sent her a picture and a concurrent sob story about a racquet ball injury," time stopped for a moment, as House realized he'd said something he shouldn't have said, something Wilson didn't know.

"Again?"

"Apparently the lack of narcotics loosens my lips. You don't hear that often. In all fairness, I'm completely sober, I didn't know what I was saying," House was visibly chagrined, he'd given Wilson a free one and was obviously kicking himself.

"I repeat, again?"

"It was when Tritter had his little crush on me. Mixture of hero worship and daddy or mommy issues. It was no big deal."

"You didn't…she didn't…" He was having difficulty forming words.

"It didn't work out very well. You can only smack Allison Cameron in the face fifty or sixty times before she gets the hint and moves on."

Things were falling apart. This time it seemed like it was just him dealing with the situation. Foreman and Chase had checked out months ago and Taub seemingly never checked in. It should have been the perfect set of circumstances, finally a team that understood, that really 'got' House and the way he operated. No one really hammered on the ethical issues, they all covered for each other, the question of whether something was ethically or morally suspect rarely popped up anymore within the Diagnostics Department. It had been like that for some time. It was actually a strange grey area. One couldn't really see what was different unless one looked very closely. That made sense, House's team was still made up of great doctors, they knew better than many what the lines really were, what the letter of the law was, how to get around it. They knew how to follow the letter of the law while ignoring the intent. In many ways, it was the perfect team. No one ever mentioned the word 'ethics' but they all knew when they were entering a grey, and even a black ethical area. It was dangerous and Wilson was worried that eventually Cuddy would miss something big and House and his team would go down hard. He didn't want to see that.

House was distracted when Cameron left. It happened very fast, Wilson's spies (nurses he charmed information out of) hadn't even caught on to it. Wilson knew Cameron loved Chase. He talked to her about it. What Wilson also knew was that their relationship grown during a time when there was a great deal of upheaval in both of their lives. When they started having sex in the hospital, he knew that Cameron was on self destruct, he knew she was trying to check out. He should have said something but he didn't, and he felt vindicated when it seemed like everything was working out. In their scant few conversations after that, in their emails before she returned, she seemed happier. Cuddy dangled a department head position in front of her and she jumped at it. They maintained a stilted friendship when she returned. She comforted him when he lost Amber, he tried to organize Chase's bachelor party. Now she was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Cameron had never lived in so much chaos. She felt as if she was constantly weaving through rooms full of boxes and dust bunnies. Most of her stuff was still in storage and she didn't trust herself to handle most of her important documents, so those were stowed away in three safe deposit boxes at the First Bank of Akron (Athens branch). She thought about hiring an investment advisor or reading the Wall Street Journal and doing research online again. If nothing else, she wouldn't be shocked again in April, when her taxes came due and what she owed was more money than she ever seen in her entire life, up until that point. Her disorganization almost felt freeing, it did feel freeing, until she started to stress about it, then she started thinking about Chase, about House.

"You could come back on for the Phase 1 trials for Zenacodrian. I could use you. You could even work remotely from OU. I still don't understand why you didn't take the job when they offered it, you must be bored out of your mind," her former boss, Mark Indio, was a different kind of genius.

He was shy, always slightly hunched over, disheveled. He thought he was fat, ugly and Cameron didn't want to give him the wrong idea by arguing with him when he was having one of his self debasing pity parties. She remembered who she was with House and she felt like she hated that person, that she didn't want to be that person anymore. He was just the kind of person that Cameron could find herself obsessing over, loving either romantically or in that strange, stilted way her feelings for House had developed. It turned out that he wasn't House, he wasn't like House at all. He was actually too good for her and he would eventually realize that. He wasn't sad and he wasn't lost in the way she was. He had a crush on her but she was doing him a favor by pretending it didn't exist. He definitely didn't need what she had to offer, especially right now. They still talked on the phone, although they didn't work together anymore. She had been offered a job when their small biotech company had been bought out but she declined.

She was paid a pittance when she first started, most of her salary was stock and options that were virtually worthless at the time. They became friends, despite Cameron's attempts to distance herself. They'd eat kabobs at four in the morning, they'd smoke joints in his mom's backyard. Cameron assumed that Mark finally realized how toxic she was, most people eventually did, Chase certainly did.

"After all of the late nights we pulled, I needed a break. I was just going to fall down dead one day, like an overworked pack horse," they had gone from his parents garage, to a small office in the Athens Research Park, to being bought by a German Drug Conglomerate in a little under two years.

She remembered times when it seemed almost dangerous, trying to practice medicine on so little sleep, and she had worked for House, she had headed up a busy emergency room at PPTH. She loved those mornings, when her mind was completely anesthetized by what seemed like decades of gels and slides. She forgot about what she thought of as the greatest failure of her life, her failure to become a normal person, to have Chase, two kids with annoying accents, anniversary dinners at over priced sushi restaurants in Melbourne.

"Are you alright? I just worry about you," Indio Labs had become fabulously successful precisely because neither of them had really wanted to go home, she learned later how alike they were, neither really sought to focus on anything other than work. They could be in the same room for hours and not say a word to each other.

She could make out the sound of Mark taking a bong hit on the other end of the line. _Indio Labs_ was essentially Mark and her, with rented lab time and a revolving door of lab techs and residents. She remembered passing out in her office, completely exhausted, and waking up in the hospital hooked up to a banana bag. They were so locked in, so obsessed with the new drug, they found themselves forgetting to eat, forgetting the day, the week, the month.

"Can you give me the number of your investment guy. I've got everything safe in money markets and certificates of deposit right now, I'm worried about the taxes."

"I don't use an investment guy. Most of my money is in _Deutsch Labs_ now, ever since the buy out. You just have yours in a savings account huh?"

"I don't want to do the wrong thing. I'm not used to it."

"Not used to what?"

"The illusion of success, millions of dollars, take your pick."

"You really are the most morose and unhappy person I've ever met," his speech was slack, strained, like he couldn't find the right word. There were long pauses, like he was constantly losing his train of thought and struggling for coherency. He was high and saying things he probably didn't mean.

On the outside looking in, she was insanely successful. She got what she wanted, important minds in her field even respected her now. Unfortunately, her years with House had made many of the accolades seem meaningless, foolish, intellectually impure. She didn't want to mentally imply that House had that much power over her, so she started trying to think of ways to refute that truth and completely lost the thread of the conversation. Mark finally broke the silence.

"Do think you sold out? Is that what it is?"

All liberal, young professional had the 'did you sell out' conversation at one time or another. Mark read Howard Zinn and Marx but he also drove a BMW. It made her feel good, in the sickest most self defeating kind of way, that she had managed to hide so many things from someone she had practically lived with for a year and a half.

"I need to take off. I've got some cleaning to do. A friend of mine is coming down from Columbus," a weekend of playing verbal judo with Wilson was the last thing she needed but he had helped her with her megalomania, and he probably thought they were friends.

"Hot date?"

"He's just an old colleague from Princeton."

"Tell him they're all a bunch of assholes for not sending you a congratulatory letter, some flowers, or anything when we went public."

She hung up the phone and stretched back out on her bed. She had a top of the line memory foam mattress that felt heavenly to sleep on. She realized that she was surrounded by dying children. Luckily, they were just pictures that Sebastian Charles had sent her from Sierra Leone. That type of thing still effected her in a removed, guilty way. It made her think of Dibala, of Chase doing what she couldn't do. In a way, it was her last mistake in a long of them throughout their relationship. She could almost feel vindicated in a morbid way; Dibala's country had dissolved into civil war shortly after his murder and independent warlords controlled areas that they ruled as feudal states. She felt angry, hopeless, and she still respected Chase for what he did. It made her feel small. Then there was Dr. Charles, still valiantly losing the war. She had become bitter. He sent her emails, invited her to join him again. She found herself seriously considering it.

Wilson was coming to visit her. She felt on edge. It had something to do with House, this wasn't just a friendly visit. They had barely spoken to each other since she left. She stubbornly refused to check up on them. House didn't respect her, he didn't think she was a good doctor. He wasn't grudgingly proud of what she had become, the way it seemed he was of Chase and Foreman. He thought she was a liar, he didn't respect who she was and that hurt intensely. Acknowledging that hurt even more, because she such respect and love for someone who essentially saw an intellectually bankrupt, incompetent waste. She waved the white flag and didn't fight it when Chase told her that he had changed his mind, that he wasn't going to run away like a coward. That was when she realized who she was, how contemptible and wrong she had always been. House finally told Chase the truth. She was just faking it; pretending to be a loving wife, pretending to be a compassionate doctor, pretending to be a human being. She sent him an email thanking him for showing her who she really was_._


	3. Chapter 3

Time slowed to a crawl. He was bored. Two years, eight months, and seven weeks ago, this wouldn't have been much of a problem. He would have ground up two pills and stirred them into a glass of whiskey. Videogames, television, everything would have instantly become more interesting. He was still in pain, a low level drone of pain was constantly with him, just out of the foreground of his mind. It was like an abscessed nerve, he found himself sitting as still as possible, even the slightest move brought the pain into the foreground, front and center. He had two hours to wait until his physiotherapy appointment.

Such appointments were necessary now, because he could no longer blunt the intense pain with narcotics. He was hovering around a five on the pain scale and eventually he was going to have to do something about it. He soaked in a whirlpool daily, had one of the less incompetent Physiotherapy interns stretch him out daily, tying him into knots and making the pain so intense that he would feel nauseous. He was afraid of the pain, he never deceived himself about that. He knew his body, he'd wake up and his thigh muscle would be wracked with spasms, throbbing, feeling like it was full of gravel. Physiotherapy was another way. A painful, less effective way of stemming the pain. They knew what they were doing and it kept him sane, although it wasn't nearly as effective as his old friend Vicodin. His only problem was that Physiotherapy tended to attract the worst kind of quacks, ex-hippies, and 'alternative' medicine lovers. He didn't need some white guy with dreadlocks urging him to 'visualize a verdant field' while digging into what was left of his thigh muscle with his thumbs. Inevitably Wilson would be waiting for as he tried to sneak out, asking him how it was going, fishing.

Wilson had been talking to Cameron. He had the hospital phone records. He was surprised when Cameron ran away. He had expected her to stay with Chase, to fight him, to be angry at the massive deception they all engineered. It was a deception that really only worked because she trusted them, she knew something was going on but she trusted them to deal with it, to tell her when the time was right. Tragic heroes and heroines have one massive flaw in their psyches that cause them to fail. Cameron trusted them and allowed herself to be deceived. It wasn't the first time. It wasn't supposed to end that way, she was still supposed in the conference room, angry, defeated, but refusing to give up. When she found out, found out on her own, she immediately wanted to run away. He tried, but he couldn't twist the threads together, what caused her to finally give up on him? Had he, in Wilson's words, pushed the situation until it broke?

He unlocked his filling cabinet, reached into the back and pulled out a massive sheaf of files, newspaper clippings, and a few pictures. It was Cameron, after she left. It was a massive amount of information but it was easy to store, because it was all in computer printout form, this wasn't 1985 after all. House had asked his new 'information guy' if he could get the hard copies, they were more aesthetically pleasing than sheet after sheet of white paper. Bob Smith, AKA Gareth Whited, AKA Jonathan Smithfield, was not nearly as fun as Lucas. There were no idiosyncrasies, no flirting with Cuddy, and he had a feeling that Wilson was catching on to him going through his garbage cans like he had before. He might have caught Bob on the fire escape across from his apartment, trying to get some pictures of Wilson and his date having coffee after their trip to the theatre. Wilson didn't say anything but that wasn't Wilson's style. He always waited until he had House dead to rights.

Cameron was working with Mark Indio, the _Biotech Wizard_, according to CNBC. Did that make Cameron the _Biotech Wizard's Apprentice?_ He had read every scrap of research on the drug, trying to find an imperfection, a problem. He wanted to show up at a conference and pull the rug out from under her, he wanted to make sure she wasn't sullying his good name, he wanted to find out all he could in case Cameron made a donation to the hospital and returned to make his life miserable, she could be way worse than Vogler. She was co-founder of the company, she ran the trials, but there was precious little information about her. There were massive, in depth interviews with Indio in the trade papers, Cameron's name was on every research paper, every grant application, he even recognized her writing style, but he couldn't find her, couldn't uncover the story between the lines. What if he needed to borrow money? He had to come up with nice things to say about her work and they had to be formulated in advance.

It was one of those 'sleep under your desk' startups that the financial rags love. He had one good picture of Cameron, with the rest of the Indio Labs team, looking like she hadn't slept in a year. Her eyes were hollow and her smile was fake. He a hand in that. He knew he should feel bad about it. He knew enough about Cameron, he knew that she thought that what he did for Chase was an indictment of who she was as a person, as a doctor. As was almost always the case in types of interpersonal situations, she was wrong. House found his eyes straying towards a particular piece of paper on his desk. He couldn't stop analyzing, judging, trying to find the real meaning of Cameron's email. It was a mystery. He couldn't let it go, if he answered a question it would pose more questions.

"Thank you for showing me who I really am. I can't change who I am and I might not have been as aware of that as I should have been. Maybe you were the only person who really saw how ugly and contemptible I could be. I've decided to thank you for that because really seeing myself makes me feel incredibly free. I'm still faced with the question of why I like you. People seem to view it as a character flaw. I think it might have been because you were too easy on me during our date. It isn't that I have to have perfection, it isn't that I look for charity cases to make myself feel better. Imperfect, broken things are easier to control. Pity is easier than love, husbandry is easier than companionship, taking care of the sick is easier than having adult relationships with the healthy. You know, you saw right through me. You saw the megalomania, you saw the iniquity in who I was, in my worldview. You tried to change that and I stubbornly fought you. In the end, maybe I sympathized with Dibala. He could force people to love him. He could force people to respect him. You saw a deep character flaw in me, and I didn't even realize it was there. I was too good at self deception, too good at deceiving my friends, family, and coworkers. It must have been interesting. Seeing who I was daily and seeing everyone around me, save for you, be utterly unaware. What I hope you understand is that I did admire, respect, and sincerely like you. I liked you for who you were and I think it was the first time in my life that I could say that was really true. I guess that doesn't make you feel very good, winning the love of a sociopath. In the end, I wish I had one ounce of your skill, one ounce of your talent for observation. If I did, I wouldn't be where I am now."

He had to marvel at how wrong she was. It was a puzzle, how she got there. He wanted to yell at her, this kind of pity party navel gazing was completely useless. She was obviously smoking pot. He thought she had an idealized view of their relationship, this tore that to shreds. He thought she had an idealized view of him, he thought her feelings were deeply couched in hero worship. He was wrong.

Smith had collected every scrap of her existence for him but nothing explained that one rambling email. He needed to set her straight. She was wrong. He didn't show her who she really was. She always knew who she really was but, like Wilson, she couldn't face the facts. She wasn't alright with what He, Foreman, and Chase had done to her during their little foray into the political assassinated business, and he wasn't going to let her pretend like she was. She gave up and now he couldn't get in touch with her and tell her how wrong she was. He did her and Chase a favor. Sure, Cameron was hiding in Ohio and you could occasionally smell bourbon on Chase's breath in the morning, but the other option was them lying to themselves and each other. Plus, Chase and Cameron both leaving would have forced him to fill two spots on his team instead of one, and he hated new people.

It surprised him that she thought she was that monstrous, because he never thought she was that self aware. He actually liked her better when the mask was a little askew, it was the same with Wilson, they were more interesting that way. It was bound to happen anyway, he couldn't rest until he found out who people really were, and he still didn't really know about Cameron, not everything at least.

He saw Chase walking into the conference room, looking pallid. To the untrained eye, to someone who didn't actively try to see everything, he looked fine, a little pale. House noticed the greasy buildup in his hair and it wasn't a style choice, he noticed a thin sheen of sweat on his knitted brow, he noticed him squinting ever so slightly. He was hung over and doing a fairly good job of hiding it.

He never got help. House washed his hands of the situation and everything was slowly congealing into something that was fairly reminiscent of normalcy, until Woodward and Bernstein showed up at their doorstep and started asking uncomfortable question about the Dibala case. Cuddy was cooperating because she didn't want to lose all of that great dictator business, they paid in cash, and Wilson was starting to lose his mind as well. She was actually pretty hot, the reporter, which was one of the reasons House didn't want to have to talk to her. He would inevitably say something inappropriate and then there would be a huge story in the New York Times about murder, past drug charges, assassination attempts, hostage situations, the muck rakers wouldn't be able to help themselves and he'd be out of a job. That wasn't what Chase was worried about, the whole process was forcing him to remember some fairly unsavory things and to tell some lies that he thought he'd never have to tell again.

Bill was trying to figure out a way to get into her research materials but this wasn't a skip trace or taking pictures of people having sex, and House wasn't particularly interested in becoming the medical community's answer to Richard Nixon. Bill was trying to figure out how much it would cost to get fake janitor's badges and sneak into the reporters office. House was pretty sure he was going to call it off because something that_ Alias_-esque would almost certainly go wrong. In any event, if a lie could last for several years, it became fairly sturdy. If Chase didn't completely lose his mind they would probably be ok, and Foreman wasn't going to let that happen.

He could hear the wind whistling outside his window, another cold day. He had Foreman in the ER, checking out a kid with blue finger tips low Oxygen saturation levels, the kicker was that he wasn't having trouble breathing. Hopefully it would be something interesting, he needed a distraction.

Wilson was in Ohio, either meeting with Cameron or actually going to the annual skin cancer conference in Columbus, he wasn't sure which one it was, but he'd have that information before the day was over. House wasn't worried, but he really didn't want a lecture on the Dibala situation from Wilson, so he hoped that Cameron would keep quiet. He found himself thinking about Cameron, all alone in some huge house in Ohio, giving up and experiencing hollow success, she was probably miserable_._


End file.
